Review: Not even Léa Seydoux and Catherine Deneuve can save “Gentle Monster”

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes, the story behind a project’s making can be more interesting and engaging than the finished product. Such is the case of Gentle Monster, Marie Kreutzer’s latest and the follow-up to her critically acclaimed Corsage. Its development started during the production of that 2022 Sissi pseudo-biopic, when the Austrian director began contacting police, psychologists, and other experts who could help her develop a script inspired by the pedophile ring scandal that had been revealed a couple of years earlier by the Die Zeit newspaper. But what was born as an attempt at exploring the complex realities hidden in the sordid story took a turn when, after Corsage’s successful run, it was discovered that one of its stars was involved in similar criminal activity.

Florian Teichtmeister played the emperor to Vicky Krieps’ empress, and was sentenced to a suspended two-year prison term for possession and production of the sordid materials. For Kreutzer, an examination of realities far away from herself suddenly became a matter too close for comfort. The director considered scrapping the whole thing but instead reinvented Gentle Monster as a gesture of self-reflection cum self-therapizing through art. The main question put forward is one about how much we truly know those we believe to understand beyond measure, those closest and most beloved. The unknowability of “the other” is central and terrifying. Yet, the reckoning with this and other ideas remains frustratingly shallow, as if we’re witnessing a film still trying to find itself…

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Best Actress at the dawn of the Age of Television: An Alternative Oscar History

by Cláudio Alves

From 1950 to 1955, only one performer won the Best Actress Oscar from an original screenplay rather than a stage-to-screen adaptation. She was Audrey Hepburn, who took the prize for 1953's ROMAN HOLIDAY, at the 26th Academy Awards.

While most of the world was rebuilding from the brink of ruin, the USA, whose territories the war barely touched, transitioned from WWII into a period of booming prosperity. As discussed in my last alternative Oscar history post, this led to a rise in conservatism and the dreaded Blacklist. But as the 50s dawned on Hollywood, another existential threat rose to challenge the big screen. I’m, of course, talking about TV, that essential symbol of midcentury domesticity. If in 1950 the appliance was still a novelty, things changed quickly. Five years later, nearly 60% of American households held court around those all-too-tempting goggle-boxes. For the film industry, this was catastrophic, as it posed unprecedented competition.

People could now get what they used to get from cinemas from the comfort of their own homes. It’s not unlike the crisis caused by the rise of streaming platforms in our day and age. Only, back then, the American movie industry responded through an arms race for new forms of spectacle, technological innovations that the television’s small screen couldn’t hope to replicate. CinemaScope and other versions of widescreen filmmaking became standardized over the square-ish-ness of the Academy ratio. Genres like the Biblical epic surged in popularity, as did other marks of lavish opulence, musicals and the like. But also films that tested the Code’s limits, from Tennessee Williams’ adaptations to the gamine-lite (dis)pleasures of The Moon Is Blue. 

But how did this reflect on the Best Actress race, both that of our actual Oscar History and the one dictated by my personal preference? And what about the rest of the world? Believe it or not, Hollywood isn’t the end-all-be-all of cinema…

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AFI Fest: “Ray Gunn” misfires while “Queen at Sea” reigns supreme

by Brian Rector

Late in the festival season, AFI Fest often brings an opportunity for Los Angelinos to catch up on titles that received buzz earlier in the year while bringing a few new films to the forefront. For instance, Brad Bird’s new animated movie Ray Gunn had its west coast red carpet premiere on the final day of the festival. On the otheer hand, Lance Hammer's Queen at Sea followed from its Berlin Film Festival debut, where it won a cadre of Silver Bears, including for its director and the Best Supporting Acting trophy for two of its performers, Tom Courtenay and Anna Calder-Marshall...

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Gotham Nominations Spread the Wealth / Kick Off Awards Season

by Nathaniel R

THE INVITE nabs four nominations at the Gotham Awards

Hi strangers! I know I’ve been absent but I will now be inching back into the site. It's that time of year again! The Gotham Award nominations are in, unofficially kicking off “awards season”. Awards season continues to always be both shape-shifting and staying exactly the same. Each year is familiar in terms of narrative tropes, genre "slots" and more, but also brand new with a new set of films and constant awards show tinkering with rules and categories! Usually with awards shows one or two films get the headlines as “leaders” but the Gothams have so few categories (just 10 really) that no film can truly claim to be "leading" the pack this time around. Japan’s Oscar submission All of a Sudden, the Nigerian “Mrs Dalloway” adaptation Clarissa, Olivia Wilde’s open marriage dramedy The Invite, Mike Leigh’s possible swan song Tender Loving Care, and the festival darling La Gradiva share the “lead” status with four nods apiece.  If you look at it by distributors the “leaders” are more glaringly obvious; A24 and NEON, distributors who have carved out recognizable identities and developed their own loyal fanbases, lead with 15 and 14 nominations respectively. Let's talk about each category...

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Review: “Wildwood” is the stop-motion fantasy epic LAIKA has been working toward all along

by Cláudio Alves

The history of Laika is one of classic nepotism by way of Maecenas-like patronage to the arts. It’s the story of how Nike’s owner, Phil Knight, took the Will Vinton Studios from their namesake and presented it to his son, Travis, who was originally one of Vinton’s animators. Some see this as a coup, others as the way studios are always formed in good ol’ Tinsel Town. Not that Laika has its headquarters anywhere near Hollywood. Instead, they’re up in Oregon, in the Portland metropolitan area, pushing out some of the most mind-boggling works of stop-motion feature animation the world has seen for the best part of the last twenty years. There’s a lot of creative freedom and technical innovation when profit isn’t a chief concern for the studio head.

It started with Selick’s Coraline, an early magnum opus, and then came the terrific ParaNorman by Fell and Butler. Annable and Stacchi’s The Boxtrolls felt, in some ways, like a step back, but, looking back, it was more like the studio taking a deep breath before releasing their most ambitious project yet into the world. With Kubo and the Two Strings, Travis Knight became a feature director in his own right, delivering a Japanese folklore-inspired fantasy adventure whose ideas on storytelling are still some of the studio’s most complex conceptual gambits. Missing Link saw Butler return and a more modest play, because, once more, a greater epic was on the horizon, more than a decade in the making. In some ways, it has all led to this, to Wildwood…

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